Driven By Ingenuity

Inventions Born Of Necessity Are A Tribute To Cubans' Creative Spirit

October 1, 2005|By Ruth Morris Havana Bureau

Guanajay, Cuba — A gas valve is reborn as the top to a pressure cooker. The motor from a weed-whacker powers a bicycle. A concoction of resin and vegetable oil are cooked up at home -- Presto! Brake fluid!

"Everything that comes into your hands is to do something," said Lomelia Mena, 72, sitting in her tidy but sparse living room in Guanajay -- a small town surrounded by cane fields about 30 miles southwest of Havana. "There are no spare parts, but there is intelligence."

If it slides, spins or sticks two things together, Cubans don't throw it away. Faced with a tight supply of consumer products of all kinds for more than 40 years, they are experts at inventing new ways to keep life clanking along.

A few blocks from Mena's home, some youths explained how they've addressed the country's transportation shortage. They rig small weed-whacker engines to bicycles, then attach a plastic soda bottle -- the gas tank -- under the seat. Asked what kind of mileage a weed-whacker gets, they estimated 160 miles to the gallon.

Motors from insecticide sprayers can also be used, said Armando Belaustiquiqoitia, 25, but chainsaw engines go the fastest, topping out near 60 mph.

"You don't have to be waiting all the time for a bus ... in the sun, sweating," he said of the freedom he enjoys now that he has a motor-bicycle, known as a riquimbili. Authorities, though, frown on them. Three weeks ago he got a ticket for driving without a license.

Such efforts are so common and necessary that the government has developed an agency to reward the most remarkable adaptations. Prizes include participation in cultural exchange programs and cash allotments of up to $200.

"This program is based on the words of Comandante Che Guevara, who said: `Worker, build your machine,'" said Mercedes Hernandez Fuentes, development coordinator for the National Association of Innovators, referring to revolutionary hero Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

"Here, not even disposable lighters get thrown away," she said.

The association is mostly geared toward professional fixes, and promotes everything from innovative teaching techniques to vitamin supplements. But it also celebrates homemakers who transform mangrove fibers into handbags, and gunnysack into tapestry.

On other occasions, the government has been less appreciative. Earlier this year, President Fidel Castro asked Cubans to refrain from using rustic fans powered by broken washing machine engines. While widely used, authorities said the apparatus drains huge amounts of electricity from the country's taxed power grid, authorities said.

Hernandez said Cuba's creative spirit was an answer to the decades-old U.S. trade and travel embargo of the island, meant to push Cuba's socialist system toward democratic reform.

"With the embargo, spare parts can't enter the country," she said, "or else it takes a very long time." Sometimes the parts aren't even available anymore.

U.S. officials, for their part, say the scarcity is largely the result of a failed economic model.

But politics won't fix an old Chevy, and in Cuba life goes on.

Condoms are blown up and painted as party balloons, or snipped into hair bands. Soda cans are cut and remolded into toy cars. An empty deodorant tube makes a doll's torso. A luggage cart doubles as a motorcycle rack.

"The idea came from necessity," he said. Before he developed the contraption two years ago, colleagues had to cut door fittings by hand. A job that used to take two or three days now takes a couple of hours.

"It's an adaptation," Riol said modestly, noting that he'd seen similar chain-saw mechanisms in other workshops. "The machine exists. This is a copy."

Besides building new machines, Cubans are experts at keeping old ones running. With its colonial arcades and collectible cars, Havana has been described as an open-air museum. But in a real museum, the artifacts get to rest.

Here, 40-year-old motorcycles buzz around town with children peering out of James Bond-style sidecars, pronounced "seedeh-car." American autos from the '50s, detailed in chrome and red leather, shuttle tourists to the beach.

And when the last piston is spent, mechanics expertly adjust newer engines to fit vintage vehicles.

One taxi driver said the engine powering his 1953 Cadillac had actually come from a forklift. Industrial mechanic Francisco Gomez Aleman, 42, said he had once hooked up a tractor engine to a bread-kneading machine.

"We're a country that's had to struggle a lot. We've had our setbacks, but from our setbacks we've moved forward," he said, as he tinkered with a Soviet-era iron. "If you tell a Cuban to invent a plane, he'll invent a plane."

Or a boat.

In the past two years, the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted three vintage vehicles transformed into floating vessels and heading toward the Florida Keys. Authorities said the cars, including a candy-green Mercury carrying 11 migrants, were not seaworthy, and sank them.